Monday, May 22, 2017

More Fun, Please: Paal Nilssen-Love at Oslo's Only Connect festival

Paal Nilssen-Love Extra Large Unit

“more fun, please”

Only Connect Festival, Oslo

May 20, 2017

Anne Hilde Neset, the artistic director of the 5-year-old
Only Connect Festival in Oslo, Norway, introduced Paal Nilssen-Love’s Extra
Large Unit by saying that for years she’d been trying to get the drummer to
“write more stuff down. For the final set of her final year with the festival,
she got her wish. Nilssen-Love supplemented his 12-piece Large Unit with 20
students from the Norwegian Academy of Music to present a 30-minute suite of
groove, humor and historical referencing.

The players were spread across the floor of the Marmorsalen
theater in the Sentralen – a posh, newly opened arts center in an old bank
building near the city center – with scattered audience seating just beyond
them, so that that players and spectators were very nearly sitting
together.

The piece, “more fun please,” seemed an endless
succession of cues and causation. It started after an extended silence with a
trombone blast and a piano smash and then a quick scattering of isolated events
until a vague arabesque emitted from a standing violinist. The blasts continued
including from electronicistTommi Keränen, Nilssen-Love’s secret weapon
in the group. The violin dance seemed to soothe the beast – first one of the
three pianos joined in and in short order everyone had followed into a quiet
rumble.

There then followed a remarkable meditation for flute and
two accordions (one in drone, the other seeming to pop reeds, if that’s possible)
before Nilssen-Love began cuing unison blasts, which seemed to kickstart a
vibraphone, playing something quicker but rather in keeping with the flute
song. One of the student pianists started playing in opposition to the vibes
but quIckly 180’d, then two drummers and four bassists pushing into free jazz
territory. A cadre of horns stormed in and the Very Large Unit began to
resemble (in sound, not size) the Cecil Taylor Unit that preceded it.

Before one could ask the stale question about composition vs
improvisation, they headed into a bit of circus music. Was Nilssen-Love teasing
the question? Was he intentionally messing with the idea of composition in jazz
by moving from a Taylor mode through a moment of Nino Rota and headlong into a
Mingus-inspired subsection? Was he raising the hackneyed notion of live
improvisation vs sterile documentation by having electronics and trumpet
players cue separate halves of the band with vinyl records onto which written
cues were taped: PAC-MAN; TEQUILA; BEAUTY; VOFF!; 8, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; an arrow
pointing upward, a cartoon of a ghost, or FUCK TRUMP (the last one being
promptly smashed)?

There was, in any event, a score on a stand in front of each
of the musicians, with pages combining traditional and graphic notation, and
the players certainly referred to them at least some of the time, and do so
there was something actually written down on paper. And from the faces of the
students and Unit members after the piece concluded, there was fun to be had,
and no doubt a wish for more.